


The Definition Of Insanity

by devovitsuasartes



Category: Outlast (Video Games)
Genre: Blood and Gore, Canon-Compliant WTFery, Character Study, Dubious Consent, Forced Feminization, Implied/Referenced Child Abuse, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-01-24
Updated: 2021-01-31
Packaged: 2021-03-16 09:48:53
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 5
Words: 13,812
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/28954473
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/devovitsuasartes/pseuds/devovitsuasartes
Summary: Following the incident at Mount Massive Asylum, an agent interviews Waylon Park about his encounter with notorious serial killer Eddie Gluskin inside the facility, and how he managed to survive.orHow I Learned To Stop Worrying And Also Stop A Serial Killer From Cutting Off My Dick And Balls.
Relationships: Eddie Gluskin/Waylon Park
Comments: 30
Kudos: 194





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> If you haven't played Outlast: Whistleblower, all you need to know is... actually you don't need to know anything. Go in blind, it's more fun that way.
> 
> (but heed the tags)

The agent watched the survivor through the two-way glass. Waylon Park was slouched down in the purposefully uncomfortable metal folding chair, staring down into his styrofoam cup with flinty eyes. The agent got the sense that Park knew he was being watched, but didn’t much care. After what he had been through, it would take more than a two-way mirror to phase him.

Deciding that he wasn’t going to get any answers just by observing, the agent gathered up the fat folder in front of him, neatly tucking in the glossy edges of photos that showed just a glimpse of the horrors in the full picture.

“Mr. Park,” he said, loudly announcing himself at the same time as he noisily opened the door, letting the metal handle bounce back up. It was a test to see how nervous Park was, but the survivor of the Mount Massive Asylum incident didn’t even so much as flinch. He didn’t even turn his head, only moving his eyes to regard the agent as he took a seat on the opposite side of the table. Now that they were in the same room, the agent could see the fading bruises on Park’s face and neck and the bloodshot corners of the whites of his eyes.

“This coffee sucks,” Park said dully, by way of greeting.

“Yeah, I keep putting in requests for an in-house Starbucks, but haven’t had any luck yet,” the agent replied, testing humor next. Park simply regarded him with an unreadable expression.

“Why am I still here?” he asked. “Am I under arrest?”

“No,” the agent replied, leaving an audible ellipsis after the word before continuing. “Of course, we’re still trying to parse exactly what happened so that we know _who_ to arrest, so that may change. For now I just need to clear up some things in your statement.”

“Why? Most of what’s in it is on video as well.”

“Most of it, yes. The ending is what I’m interested in, though, and that’s not on the video.”

A muscle in Park’s cheek flexed as he clenched his jaw - the first sign the agent had seen of him being rattled. “Of course you’re interested in the pervy part,” he said drily. “I’ve heard law enforcement has a tendency to attract deviants and psychopaths.”

It was a volley across the net, intended to provoke a reaction from the agent. He was used to serving the volleys, but he was also experienced enough not to let insults from an interview subject bother him. 

“The pervy part, as you put it, seems to be the most complex. The rest of it is fairly straightforward. You were attempting to escape Mount Massive after the incident, and you were avoiding the patients that had been let loose.”

“The murderers and cannibals and crazies, yes. I was avoiding them.”

“Right. The camcorder footage covers a lot of that. But then the footage ends and it says here…” The agent made a show of refreshing his memory by reading the statement, even though he could practically recite it word-for-word now. “You ran into what seems to be the craziest of the crazy murderers. Certainly the one with the highest body count. Both before and after he was committed to Mount Massive.”

Park could clearly tell that the agent was belaboring the point. He leaned back in his chair even more, folded his arms and looked up at the ceiling.

“Eddie Gluskin,” the agent continued, watching Park’s face for any flinch in response to the name.

None was forthcoming, but Park’s gaze went distant for a moment as he murmured, almost to himself, “They called him The Groom.”

*

“Darling.”

He seemed to appear from nowhere behind the door that Waylon had been trying to get through, but now wanted to do nothing more than get away from. The first time he’d seen Eddie Gluskin the man had been naked and afraid, safely on the other side of the glass as he begged Waylon to save him from the doctors’ vile experiments. Now Eddie’s face was spattered with red blisters and the whites of his eyes were filled with blood, so that the pale blue orbs of his irises stood out within them like a car’s headlights in the dark.

Some of Mount Massive’s patients wore jumpsuits, like the one that Waylon was now wearing. Some wandered round half-trapped in straightjackets. Some were naked. Many were covered in gore. But Eddie Gluskin was wearing an approximation of a wedding tux: blue vest stitched together from denim, a ridiculous bow tie, and garters around the upper arms of his soiled, patchwork white shirt. And for some reason, this formal outfit was more frightening to Waylon than the jumpsuits or the straightjackets or even the patients wearing no clothes at all.

“Did I frighten you?”

*

“Did he frighten you?”

Park slowly shifted his gaze to make eye contact with the agent, staring at him like he was an idiot.

“I was terrified the whole time I was in there,” he said, the monotone of his words a strange mismatch for what he was saying. “More terrified than I’ve ever been in my life. I thought I was going to die of terror every time I turned another corner.”

“But Gluskin frightened you more than the others?”

“The others were frightened of him. Even before I knew exactly why, I knew it had to be because of something very, very bad.”

“Right. So that’s why I’m having trouble understanding some of the wording in your statement.”

Park’s face went blank in a very careful, studied way.

“Forgive me for being blunt, Mr. Park. I’d just like to _confirm_ that Gluskin raped you.”

The only sound in the room was the ticking of the second hand of the clock. A steady _click, click, click_ that now seemed incredibly loud.

“Mr. Park?”

“Does it matter?” Park asked heavily. “What, the… the bodies hanging from the ceiling aren’t enough evidence for you? His little sculptures? The women he murdered and mutilated before he got put in that place? It’s not like you _need_ a rape allegation. Any one of those photos in your folder there would convince a jury that Gluskin needs to be locked up for the rest of his life. On top of everything else, one rape… Jesus. You might as well pursue a shoplifting conviction.”

It was the most Park had spoken since the agent had entered the room. He’d finally touched the nerve he was looking for.

“I just need to know,” he said, pressing harder on the nerve. “If the sex with Gluskin was consensual or not.”

A strangled laugh tore its way out of Park’s throat. “If you’d seen what I’d seen in there,” he said. “You’d understand why consent was the least of my worries.”

*

Waylon’s eyes were starting to dry out as he stared at the scene through the torn grille of the locker. He should look away, he should spare himself the nightmares if by some miracle he actually survived this hellhole. But he couldn’t. It was like craning your neck to look at a car wreck. He didn’t want to see the horror and gore, but instinct pushed him towards it.

“What a fuss, what a fuss! Oh darling, I know you’re anxious. All brides are a little nervous on their wedding night. And I know this bit isn’t going to be pleasant, but I’ll be right here holding your hand. We just need to take care of these ugly parts before we can start our life together.”

“Oh god,” Waylon said in a hoarse whisper, remembering the sick sculpture he’d seen. The man mutilated to look like a woman giving birth. The severed head between the mess of his legs. And from what he could see through the locker grille, he could guess all too easily what the ‘ugly parts’ were and how Eddie Gluskin was going to take care of them.

Sure enough, the Groom began to move the wooden plank to which his current victim was tied - legs forcibly spread apart - down the table, towards the serrated spinning blade. The man’s screams ratched up and then turned into a single unending sound as he made contact and the blood spatter began.

*

“So it _was_ consensual, then,” the agent said, unable to keep the edge of derision out of his voice. “I just need to confirm, for my report.”

The corners of Park’s eyes tightened. He was young, only in his early thirties, but he somehow looked years older than the photos in the agent’s file that were taken shortly before the incident. Park was silent for what felt like a long time, and when he spoke again his voice was as smooth as a scalpel blade.

“Eddie Gluskin wanted to make me his wife. You understand what I mean by that? Making me his wife? I know you’ve got photos of the bodies there in your folder.”

“I have,” the agent conceded. “Although the extent of the mutilation makes it difficult…”

“Well let me draw you a clearer picture then,” Park interrupted. “Eddie was going to remove my genitals by pushing me groin-first onto a table saw. Then, if I didn’t die of blood loss - hell, maybe even if I did - he was going to rape me in the open wound where my dick and balls used to be.”

The second hand of the clock ticked. The agent swallowed around the sudden dry lump in his throat. Under the table, he crossed his legs.

Satisfied at breaking the agent’s cool, the corner of Park’s mouth quirked up ever so slightly. “But now I’m sitting in this room, on this shitty chair, drinking shitty coffee with my dick and balls still attached. So yeah, if you want to put that in your report, I consented to some stuff in order to make that happen. I made a choice, out of the choices that I had. But in Mount Massive, all I had were bad choices.”

*

The other brides were all dead or dying now. Only Waylon remained, trapped in the locker. Tipping the remains of his last wife off the table with a morose sigh, Eddie wiped his forehead with his sleeve. Then he straightened up and fixed his terrifying gaze on Waylon’s makeshift cell. He picked up a canister of something as he slowly approached.

Waylon wasn’t frightened any more. At least, not actively. He had been frightened for so long that now it was like a constant whine inside him that he’d learned to ignore - like listening to an album you know well and realizing several songs have played without you really hearing them. On top of this bedrock of fear, Waylon had been thinking. He’d been planning.

So when the Groom got close, beaming at the locker with the expression of a man waiting at the altar and anticipating the arrival of a fair figure in a white gown, Waylon fought down his urge to cringe backwards into the limited space. Instead he leaned forward, letting his eyes show through the torn grille, then lifted his hand and poked his fingers through the gap. They were fairly short and slender fingers for a man, with no hair on the knuckles. In the remaining space of his small window, Waylon saw Eddie Gluskin pause.

Waylon took a little piece of his fear and pulled it into his throat to mold together a simulacrum of shy curiosity. And with that in place he said, quietly enough to entice Eddie to lean in: 

“Hi.”

*

“Sounds like a fucked up romance novel,” the agent said, having recovered from the table saw visual and returned to his plan of trying to provoke Waylon Park. “ _I Seduced A Psychopath_. Now that’s a real page-turner.”

“He’s not a psychopath,” Park said, in a tone that suggested he _knew_ the agent knew that. It was in Gluskin’s file, after all. “What I did wouldn’t have worked on a psychopath. His crimes were all crimes of passion. I’m more of a psychopath than Eddie Gluskin is. I’d just watched him carve up those men, and I held it together enough to flirt with him. What’s that, if not psychopathic?”

“It’s smart,” the agent said begrudgingly. “I thought you were a computer programmer, not a psychologist?”

Park shrugged. “They’re not so different. In my job, I look for bugs. The first thing you do with a bug is find a way to replicate it. You _need_ to be able to replicate it to figure out what’s going wrong. People have their own programming, and Eddie Gluskin’s programming has a pretty catastrophic bug. And he replicated it for me, over and over. I saw the bodies. I knew his pattern. And then it was just a matter of finding a way to break it.”

“What was the pattern?”

Park held up one finger. “He desires men.” He held up a second. “He turns the men into women.” He held up a third. “He kills the women he’s made.”

“You said he wanted to make you his wife. Make you into a woman.”

“He _thinks_ that’s what he wants. But Eddie doesn’t want women at all. He hates women. He was put in Mount Massive for murdering women.”

“Then why try to turn men into women, if he’s gay?”

“Are you going to keep pretending you haven’t read his file?” Park asked sharply, sitting up in his chair. “Or is it that you have read it, and you’re just too stupid to connect the dots?”

The agent didn’t let his face move. He’d been called a lot worse than “stupid” by people he’d interrogated.

Seemingly regretting the outburst, Park settled back once more. He continued in a clinical voice, “Eddie was sexually abused by his father and uncle when he was a child. Then the poor bastard had the bad luck to grow up gay. So he desires men, but when he sees male genitals it brings back memories of what happened to him when he was a kid. He feels disgusted, feels like he’s got to cut them away. But then he sees a woman. He sees his mother, who would just turn the TV up when she heard him screaming in his bedroom. And so then…” 

Park made a grisly tearing noise in his throat as he drew a finger across his neck. He dropped his hand and curled it around the cold cup of coffee before continuing.

“It’s more complicated than that, of course, but the bottom line is that if I wanted to stay alive, I had to stop him from cutting me. I had to change the script.”

*

With a strange gentleness, Eddie touched the tips of his own fingers to Waylon’s where they were poking through the grill. “Hello, my darling,” he crooned. “Why, I was just going to give you something to help you sleep before your big makeover.”

Waylon withdrew his fingers slowly, seeing Eddie’s face fall in response to the loss of contact.

“Oh,” Waylon said in a small, disappointed voice. He didn’t say anything else. Eddie’s other victims had babbled and begged, so Waylon instead waited quietly.

Eddie wavered, his brow furrowed in uncertainty. He had a canister of knockout gas in one hand, but made no move to use it. “Well,” he said at last. “I suppose I should at least unwrap you first.”

He drew closer, grunting with effort as he unlocked the door with a scraping of metal, and then let it swing open. Waylon tilted his head down as he stepped out, and then looked up at Eddie through his eyelashes. He only half-pretended to stumble (his legs were stiff and wobbly from standing for so long) and fell against Eddie for support, hooking clinging fingers into the clumsily stitched wedding vest. Eddie didn’t stagger under the sudden weight, but grabbed Waylon’s hips with his large hands to steady him, pulling his new ‘bride’ close to his body and looking down into Waylon’s face with a surprised but pleased expression.

Waylon made himself maintain eye contact for a moment, wide-eyed as a Disney princess, except instead of looking at Prince Charming he was staring into the scarred, mad, gimlet-eyed face of a serial killer. He waited for Eddie’s face to broaden into a smile, and then ducked his head shyly against the wedding vest.

It smelled like blood.

*

“That was your master manipulation plan?” the agent said, unimpressed. “Act like a sissy boy?”

Park just raised an eyebrow. “I’m alive and intact, aren’t I?” he pointed out. “Manipulation doesn’t have to be complicated. It just has to work. Eddie’s attracted to men, but he’s revolted by masculinity. He desires femininity because it’s non-threatening, but he hates women. A sissy boy is what he wanted, so that’s what I gave him.”

“And that’s why he didn’t try to cut you?”

“Oh, he still tried to cut me.”

*

Waylon let Eddie lead him by the hand over to the bloodied saw and table. There were still some entrails on it, and Eddie fastidiously pulled his sleeve up to keep the material clean before sweeping them onto the floor with a sheepish chuckle, like a husband whose wife had found his porno collection. 

Every nerve in Waylon’s body was screaming at him to run as far away from the table and the saw as he could, but instead he forced himself to lean back against it, bracing his hands against the edge. He made a show of trying to hop up onto it, but lacking the strength, and grunted unhappily. Eddie noticed, laughed indulgently, and put his hands on Waylon’s hips, fingers curving around to graze his ass.

“Here, darling, let me help you,” he said. There was a drugged, happy look in his eyes as he lifted at the same time as Waylon pushed up with his hands, the two of them together perching Waylon onto the blood-soaked wood. Waylon swayed deliberately and pressed a hand against Eddie’s stomach to steady himself. The muscle underneath the wedding vest and shirt felt as hard and unyielding as the table he was sitting on.

“Thank you,” Waylon murmured. Out of the corner of his eye he saw the blade of the saw turn slowly, shifting with the jostling of the table.

“Oh,” Eddie breathed delightedly, ducking down to press his forehead against Waylon’s. “Oh, but you’re a sweet little thing. May I kiss you, darling?”

*

The agent looked up from his note-taking, brow furrowed. “He asked _permission_ to kiss you?”

“Like I said. Complicated.”

*

Waylon was careful to only be reactive, not aggressive. He kissed Eddie Gluskin like it was his first time, and he wasn’t quite sure what to do with his mouth yet. Eddie was shaking with happiness and arousal, alternating between long presses and excited nips, sliding his lips down Waylon’s chin and kissing the underside of his jaw. He caressed Waylon’s neck, and then drew his fingers down to grab hold of the jumpsuit zipper.

“Oh, I can’t wait,” he sighed, beginning to draw it down. “I can’t wait to make you ready for me.”

 _Well, fuck,_ Waylon thought, panic starting to rise in his throat. He’d felt so clever to have pushed Eddie off the rails of his usual _modus operandi,_ but now the engine was starting to right itself back into familiar territory. Eddie’s priority was still to “fix” him before anything else could happen, and Waylon knew exactly what would happen after that step. There would be no stopping the killing then - not that he’d even _want_ to stop it after being pushed onto the saw.

His mind raced for a solution as the zipper reached his navel and Eddie abandoned it to lift his hands to Waylon’s shoulders, pushing the clothing back. The motion reminded Waylon of one of those late-night erotic movies aimed at women, and he flashed on the white wedding dresses he’d seen while he was trying to flee Eddie. And then, thank god, he had an epiphany.

Just before Eddie could push the jumpsuit to his waist, Waylon grabbed hold of the front of it and bunched it in front of his chest, covering up an imaginary pair of tits. It was easy to let his shoulders shake as he ducked his head down and hunched into himself - a performance of shame.

Eddie didn’t let go of the jumpsuit entirely, but he stopped trying to drag it down. “What’s wrong, my love?” he asked, leaning back to take in the sight of Waylon’s demure pose, brow furrowing in confusion and then spreading in realization. “Are you shy?”

Waylon hugged his arms together tighter, hoping to press his pecs together enough to create the impression of cleavage under the bunched-up front of his jumpsuit. “We’re not married yet,” he whined. “You’re not supposed to see me naked until the wedding night.”

He chanced a look up at Eddie then, to see if the gambit had worked. The man’s pale blue eyes bored into him with something that looked like suspicion, but Waylon could see the gears turning in Eddie’s head. He wasn’t doomed yet.

“I know that’s tradition,” he conceded grudgingly. “But we can’t have the wedding night until you’re fixed.”

Tying his brows together in confusion like he hadn’t spent the last 12 hours watching Eddie tear into men’s groins, Waylon repeated, “Fixed?”

“Yes, darling. We just have to tidy you up a bit. Get rid of your... vulgar parts.”

The quiet horror of the phrase made it easy enough for Waylon to allow his face to crumple. He tugged the jumpsuit tighter around him and wailed, “Vulgar? You think I’m _ugly?_ ” He drew his knees up to his chest and began sobbing theatrically into them.

Somewhere above him he heard Eddie groan in exasperation. “ _Women!_ ” he lamented, like a hen-pecked husband in a 1960s sitcom. “So sensitive about their looks.”

Waylon continued to sniffle into his knees, until he felt Eddie take hold of one of his ankles and tug it down, then reach around him to lift the jumpsuit back into place over his shoulders. A wave of relief crashed over him, but he didn’t let up fake-crying yet. 

“Darling.”

Waylon continued his sobbing.

Suddenly he felt Eddie grab his chin, wrench it up off his still-raised knee, and there was a sharp _smack_ and a burst of pain in Waylon’s left cheek. Eddie hadn’t slapped him with his full strength, nothing close to it, but it was enough to make Waylon stop his wailing and gape at his captor, stunned.

Eddie immediately soothed the hot cheek by stroking it with his thumb. “I’m sorry I had to do that,” he said sternly. “But you were hysterical. Not your fault, darling. Just the weakness of your sex. Cover yourself up, then.”

With a shaking hand, Waylon pulled the zipper of his jumpsuit back up in stops and starts, careful to keep covering his non-existent breasts as he did so.

“Now stop your fretting,” Eddie ordered, an edge of roughness to his voice. He was clearly annoyed at being thrown off his plan, but - thank god - he seemed resigned to giving Waylon’s genitals a stay of execution.

For now.


	2. Chapter 2

The agent leaned back against the cinder-block wall, a fresh cup of coffee in one hand and his notebook in the other. Most of the other agents now kept notes on tablet computers or even their phones, but he liked the tangibility of paper and pen. Physically putting the words down in blue ink always helped him to think better than simply tapping a keyboard on a screen.

There was a loud buzzing noise and the heavy metallic scrape of the locks in the door being drawn back. He looked up as the thick barrier creaked open and a junior agent stepped out, looking somewhat pale.

“He’s ready for you now, sir,” the young woman said. “He got a bit lively earlier, but he’s fully restrained and on a light sedative. It should be enough to keep him sleepy without making him too doped-up to answer questions.”

The agent nodded, flipping his notebook closed. “Keep the sedative off the record,” he instructed. “It could complicate things down the line if there’s paperwork showing he was drugged during the interrogation.”

“Yes, sir.”

She walked away. The agent steeled himself and then stepped through the door. There was a checkpoint with two armed guards and a metal detector on the other side. As the agent stepped through, it beeped.

“Any metal on you, sir?” one of the guards asked.

The agent thought for a moment, then pulled the notepad from the pocket of his suit jacket and extracted the pen from it. It was a platinum-coated Montblanc. He didn’t usually care much for luxury items, but this was given to him as an anniversary gift by his wife. 

“You’ll have to leave it here, sir.”

“Seriously?” The agent raised an eyebrow. 

“Strict orders from the top. They don’t want to take any risks with Gluskin.”

The agent reluctantly handed over the pen, with a glare that made it clear he wouldn’t tolerate it getting “lost.” He felt naked without it as he walked down the hall, wishing he’d thought to bring a pencil - hell, even a child’s crayon. He always took notes during interviews, even if there was nothing of interest to write. His notebook was like a suit of armor between him and the person on the other side of the table.

In this interview room, though, there wasn’t even a table. Gluskin was sitting in a chair that was strongly bolted to the floor. A straightjacket confined his arms into a protective hug around his body, and a strap around his chest held him tightly against the back of the chair. His legs were bound together and shackled by a chain to the chair leg, so that even if he broke free of the upper body restraints all he could do would be to fall off the chair, still anchored to it.

The walls, floor and ceiling of the room were white, and brightly lit by the bare fluorescent strips. There was a chair opposite Gluskin, and a bold red stripe of paint indicating that the agent should not get any closer than that line. He took a seat opposite the serial killer and Gluskin regarded him with piercing eyes - blue irises, crimson whites. If he really was sedated, he showed no sign of it.  He was an intimidating sight, but the agent was confident in the restraints, which he’d seen hold bigger and angrier prisoners.

“Mr. Gluskin,” he said evenly. “How do you feel.”

The man regarded him for a moment. Then his face burst into an expression of dismay and in an unexpectedly clear voice he declared, “I’m ever so worried! My wife is missing, you see.”

The agent gave a small nod, then opened the file folder he’d carried in with him and took out a photo of Waylon Park. He held it up so that it faced Gluskin, who peered at it with a furrowed brow.

“This is who you’re referring to?”

“My wife...” Gluskin said, his voice vague for a moment, before breaking into anger. “Why do you have a photo of her? Has she been unfaithful to me? With  _ you? _ Has she made a cuckold of me already?” he wailed, weakly trying to thrash against the tight embrace of the straightjacket. 

That was interesting. According to the notes on Gluskin, the man had developed an inability to view other men as men. He saw all men as deformed women in need of fixing - all potentially his perfect bride. But now he recognized the agent as both a man and as competition, and while the agent would like to flatter himself that it was because he was somehow uniquely and undeniably masculine, he knew there was probably a different explanation.

Waylon Park had suggested, cryptically, that Gluskin would probably be more lucid once he was away from the influence of the Mount Massive Asylum. Though he wouldn’t say exactly what he meant, probably for fear of giving the agent ammunition to have him committed, it was clear that Park thought something at the facility had been amplifying Gluskin’s madness. And after reviewing the footage, the agent had a chilling feeling that Park was right.

“Your… wife is fine, Mr. Gluskin. I assure you, no one has touched him. He’s being taken care of.”

Gluskin looked suspicious, but he didn’t question the agent’s use of pronouns. He simply sighed, and the rough edge of anger left his voice as he gazed up at the ceiling.

“Poor thing. She must be so frightened. She’ll be missing me terribly. Such a sweet, delicate little thing, my love is.”

The agent smiled falsely. “Why don’t you tell me more about her?”

*

Eddie took care cleaning and bandaging the wound in her shin, privately delighting in the smooth curve of her calf and the coy protrusion of her ankle bone. She sat on the edge of a sink in the filthy bathroom placidly, extending her lower leg out to give him access and occasionally hissing in pain as he plucked out the wooden splinters with his teeth.

“Silly girl,” Eddie chided gently as he dabbed at her injury with a rag covered in slippery, strong-smelling antiseptic, determined to eradicate any corruption. “You shouldn’t have run from me like that. Look what you’ve done to yourself.”

“I’m sorry,” she said meekly. “I was just startled. I wasn’t thinking.”

He chuckled and pressed a kiss to her bare foot. “You were thinking too much, darling. It’s not good for you. But once we’re married you’ll never have to think again. I’ll do all the thinking for both of us, and you just have to be beautiful and have lots of babies.”

Eddie kissed her again, above the wound this time, and paused as he felt his lips touch the dark curls of hair on her leg.

“I don’t mean to be indelicate, my dear,” he said carefully. “But you’ll have to get a little more diligent about grooming when we’re married as well. No man wants a wife with hairy legs.”

To his despair, she drew her leg back self-consciously then. Eddie remembered how strongly she’d reacted when he’d brought up the issue of preparing her for the wedding night, and sighed inwardly. She was so sensitive about her looks, about any suggestion that she might be unfeminine. Still, there was something captivating about that fragility. Such a difference from all those other wanton whores he’d had to string up.

Eddie cast his mind around for a way to make the mood romantic again. Suddenly it came to him, and he slipped the sharp knife from his belt and brandished it at her. For a moment he thought he saw her flinch, and he felt anger bubble up inside him, but then he decided he must have imagined it. She wasn’t doing anything - just sitting there very still and looking from the knife to Eddie’s face questioningly.

Satisfied, Eddie declared, “I can shave your body before the wedding. You have such lovely smooth skin. It will feel so much nicer for both of us without all that unsightly hair on your legs, and your arms, and your…” His glance fell on her chest, where he’d caught that tantalizing hint of her skin earlier, and the next words staggered and thickened in his throat. “Your sweet little breasts, my love. I could play with them while I shave you. Taste your lovely nipples. Then shave your belly, where the children will grow inside you after I plant my seed.”

He felt a sharp shudder of arousal pass through her body. But she was a good girl, curse her. She wouldn’t be so easily got.

“You can’t see me before the wedding,” she reminded him reproachfully. There was a pause before she said, “But if you like, I can shave myself.”

*

The agent cleared his throat. “So if I understand what Mr. Gluskin told me correctly, and if he can be believed, he…” He made a show of checking his notebook, even though he’d been able to write nothing down while interviewing Gluskin. “Left you alone in the bathroom, with his knife, for about an hour.”

“That’s right,” Park replied calmly.

“Was he guarding the door?”

“Probably, but there was an open vent I could have escaped through.”

“But you didn’t?”

“No.”

“Instead you stayed in the bathroom and… shaved.”

Park grimaced, and lifted his left ankle up onto his right knee, scratching it through his borrowed sweatpants. “I wish you hadn’t reminded me. Have you ever shaved your whole body with a dirty knife, using nothing but cold water and an asylum grade soap bar?”

“I can’t say that I have,” the agent replied drily.

“I’m itchy all over. Ingrown hairs like you wouldn’t believe. And the ones that aren’t ingrown are just starting to poke up again like little spikes. Ugh.”

“Mr. Park.”

“Yeah?”

“Why didn’t you  _ leave? _ ”

Waylon Park paused in his scratching, his gaze turned inward for a moment. He let his foot drop back down to the ground. “I thought about it,” he said. “For a while. Looking between the vent and the door. But he told you I was injured, right? My ankle?”

“Yes.”

“Well, Mount Massive was one great big fire, metaphorically speaking, and I was in the frying pan. If I made a run for it, I might have gotten out. More likely I would have been caught by one of the others, or by…” He cut himself off, his face suddenly guarded and careful, the way it got when it brushed up against the topic of the unspeakable thing at Mount Massive Asylum. “But like I said, they were all scared of Eddie. And I thought… maybe. Maybe if I can survive him, he can get me out of here. Or at least get me close to the front door.”

“That’s quite a gamble you took, Mr. Park.”

“Then I guess you could say I’m a very lucky man.”

*

Waylon had no idea what time it was, but it felt like it took forever to get ready. He made a mental note that if he ever saw Lisa again, he’d apologize to her for all the times he had sighed and tried to hurry her out the door to one party or another. And it wasn’t like he even had to fix his hair or put on makeup; all Waylon had to do was shave and then find a way to tidy away his junk where it wouldn’t offend Eddie and bring out his stabby urges. 

Waylon zipped his jumpsuit back up as high as the zipper would go, then hesitated and pulled it down a couple of inches to expose some of his freshly-shaved chest. He glanced over at himself in the mirror and was surprised to see how calm and determined he looked. Masculine, despite his newly smooth skin. Waylon remembered who was waiting for him on the other side of the door and shook himself a little, figuring out how to soften his posture and expression into something placid and non-threatening before he left the bathroom.

Eddie was crouched in front of a dressmaker’s doll, sewing the hem of a wedding dress that looked like it was made for the Bride of Frankenstein. White material in various different textures and shades, stitched together in patches. Waylon could see what looked like lab coat material sewn alongside the heavy fabric of straightjackets. It was an appropriate enough outfit for the occasion.

“Ah, my angel,” Eddie sighed, dropping his hands down onto his thighs and looking up at Waylon with dreamy admiration. “You’re so smooth and clean now. And look, your dress is ready!”

Limping forward, keeping the weight on his good ankle, Waylon made a show of being in quiet awe of the hideous wedding dress. “It’s beautiful,” he said.

It was shoulderless, with a bodice molded around the female body of the mannequin. The lace at the back, upon closer inspection, was actually strips of gauze threaded through holes punctured in the tough material. Despite himself, Waylon was actually impressed by the construction - the way the top part flowed into the skirt. He wondered how Eddie had gotten so good at sewing, then quickly decided he didn’t want to know.

Eddie beamed. “I’m so glad you like it. Quick, put it on! I don’t want to rush you, darling, but the guests are already waiting for us in the chapel.”

*

“So you put on the dress,” the agent said, looking down at his notebook, hoping that his cheeks weren’t turning red. He’d coolly listened to many, many murderers brag about the grisly details of their killings, but he wasn’t similarly armed against a story like this.

“I made him turn around,” Waylon Park replied, by way of confirmation. “I mean, I’m sure he peeked. But it was all part of the blushing virgin act. He was  _ really _ into it at that point.” Park looked up at the ceiling thoughtfully. “He must have a good eye for measurements, because the dress actually fitted really well.”

“You didn’t mind wearing it?”

Park snorted. “Given that the alternative option was a trip groin-first down the table saw, dressing up and trying to look like a girl didn’t really bother me, no.”

“Well,” the agent said, giving the impression that he was speaking without thinking (though he never did). “I suppose the illusion was helped along by the fact that you’re…”

Park narrowed his eyes across the table at the sudden, pointed silence. “Asian?” he finished acidly.

“Of a more slender build,” the agent continued, faux-diplomatically.

Park snorted. “Good save. But yeah. I don’t know if it would have worked as well if I’d been closer to Eddie’s size. He got kind of obsessive about how I was smaller than him, and about my…”

*

“...Lovely delicate bone structure,” Eddie murmured, hoping his beloved wasn’t bothered by his brutish, heavy breathing as he laced up the back of her dress. He’d chanced a look at her while she was changing and caught a scandalous glimpse of her bare back. Now he was up close to it, his rough knuckles brushing her smooth skin as he tied the dress to her with care. She smelled enticingly of clean skin and soap, and Eddie was nearly dizzy with desire as he tied the final ribbon and then brushed a hand over her shoulder.

She was holding still, her head bowed demurely. The guests were waiting, but curse them! Eddie needed just a taste first.

“I just need to check the fit,” he said huskily, closing his eyes and pressing his face into his beloved’s hair. “We don’t want any wardrobe mishaps while you’re walking down the aisle. I won’t look, I promise.”

She didn’t object like she had before, so Eddie took that as permission and slid his hand down the front of her chest, feeling along the edge of the bodice and then slipping his fingers beneath it. The garment was an excellent fit, and pressed his hand close as he stroked the barely-there rise of her breast. He found her small nipple and rolled it between his fingers, groaning brokenly into her hair as he used all of his willpower to hold back from canting his hips forward and pressing his excitement into the fabric over the tantalizing curve of her buttocks…

*

“Yes, thank you,  _ thank you, _ Mr. Gluskin!” the agent said loudly, hoping that by the time he stopped drowning out the lurid details with his own voice, the killer would have stopped talking. He did, but now he had his head tilted back and his eyes closed dreamily, and he was shifting his hips in the chair in an upsettingly suggestive manner.

“So lovely,” Eddie Gluskin sighed at last, thankfully diverted from his R-rated monologuing. “Oh, I wish we’d had a photographer at the wedding, but it was all so last-minute. I’d love to have a photo of her in the dress.” His voice turned spiteful. “And photos of all those jealous bitches in the pews.”

The agent furrowed his brow. “Who?”

Gluskin giggled mischievously. “Oh, my wife was very put out by it. It was  _ very _ naughty of me. But a man can’t help wanting to show off such a beautiful bride! So I invited all of my exes to the wedding. Well, not all of them. There was limited seating, and some of them I couldn’t cut down, and others just completely fell apart when I tried to bring them to the chapel. But I made sure the pews were full, and all those other  _ failures _ were there watching with their cold whore eyes while I married her. They saw what they could have had.”

The agent’s brow wrinkled in recognition rifled through his folder until he found one of the crime scene photos. He looked down at it, and it was only years of desensitization that prevented him from grimacing at the horrible tableau.

Gluskin swayed forward in his chair and squinted across the room at the photo. Then he crowed in delight. “Oh, someone  _ did _ get a photo of them! Oh please, won’t you send me a copy? I want to have it framed!”

The agent stuffed the photo back into the folder, ignoring Gluskin’s noise of disappointment. 

“Thank you, Mr. Gluskin, we’ve covered a lot of ground here. All that’s left is to talk about the wedding night and the honeymoon.”

The crimson-stained whites of Gluskin’s eyes widened and he nodded eagerly, already opening his mouth to speak.

“I think I’ll get that part of the story from your wife instead,” the agent continued hurriedly, gathering up his things and leaving the room as quickly as he could.


	3. Chapter 3

“Now we’re getting to the good stuff, right?” Waylon Park asked, his eyes boring into the agent as though he could see right into his mind, his lip curling slightly. “Enough with the foreplay. You just want to know who stuck what where.”

The agent didn’t let the accusation get a rise out of him. “We can take a break if you like, Mr. Park,” he said calmly.

“No. I want to get this over with.” 

Park drained the last of his third cup of coffee, grimacing at the bitterness. Then he folded his arms on the table and leaned forward, carefully scrutinizing the agent before continuing.

“So, we acted out the whole wedding ceremony. Though I’m pretty sure it wasn’t legal, since it was officiated by this crazy guy who thought he was a priest, and all the other witnesses were mutilated corpses. Eddie was loving it, but then after the wedding he got kind of quiet.”

Park looked down at his hands, which were covered in small scrapes and injuries from his time scrambling through the twisted halls of Mount Massive Asylum. His expression became clouded, as if a shadow of the fear he'd felt then had passed over him.

“That was the most dangerous time,” he said, speaking more to himself than to the agent. “I don’t think Eddie had ever gotten that far before. He’d never had one of his… brides survive all the way to the wedding ceremony. Definitely never had anyone make it to the wedding without going under his knife first. He’d skipped a step with me, and he was getting antsy about it.”

*

“Come on, my love,” Eddie said, his eyes flitting about in agitation before he suddenly swept Waylon up into a bridal carry. Though it was the last thing he wanted to do, Waylon wrapped his arms around the back of Eddie Gluskin’s neck and leaned into him as though he trusted his new “husband” unconditionally. 

He could see a room off to the side where Eddie had piled up mattresses to make a marital bed and lit a dangerous number of candles all around it, but that wasn’t where Eddie was taking him. No, Waylon was carried through the asylum until he found himself back in Eddie’s workshop. The other bodies had been cleared away and there was a light over one of the tables, which had a white sheet laid out over it in a ceremonial fashion.

Waylon’s instincts screamed at him to fight his way out of Eddie’s arms and start running, but he was mindful of his ankle, now wrapped in bandages with strips of gauze lacing up his leg and around his foot to resemble a stocking. He allowed Eddie to deposit him on the table and forced himself to look with calm inquisitiveness as the killer drew his knife.

“Time for our wedding night, my sweet,” Eddie said with a smile, seeming more confident now that he was back in familiar territory. “Time for you to stop being a girl and to become a woman. Just lay back, darling, and I’ll remove the parts you don’t need any more. It’ll hurt, but only for a moment.”

He rested the hand that was holding the knife on Waylon’s shoulder, starting to push him down to the table, but Waylon instead lifted his own hand and rested it lightly on Eddie’s forearm.

“But Eddie,” he said with a gentle smile.

*

“And _that_ was a fucking gamble,” Park added. “I’d never used his actual name before. That could have set him off in any number of ways.”

“Then why use his name at all?” the agent asked.

“Like I said, it was a gamble.” Park drummed his fingers on the table distractedly. “He was getting back on his usual script. And that was bad news for me. I had to show him that I…” He chuckled at the cliché. “That I wasn’t like all the other girls. That I was special. I had to forge that connection with him.”

“With a psychopath?”

“We’ve been through this,” Park said wearily. “He’s not a psychopath. It wasn’t that he didn’t _care_ that he was hurting those other wo- those other men. He knew that he was hurting them, and he didn’t want to hurt them. That wasn’t the _point_ of it. At least, not while he still thought of them as brides instead of whores. Cutting them up was a means to an end. So I had to convince him that he was already _at_ the end. Get him to skip a beat but keep on dancing.”

He shut his mouth and shook his head, glaring down into the empty coffee cup for a few moments before continuing.

“So I told him…”

*

“But Eddie, I already took care of that.”

If the use of his name set him on edge, Eddie didn’t show it. But his brow furrowed in confusion, as if they’d been rehearsing for a play and Waylon had improvised an extra line. He didn’t look angry, though, so Waylon pressed on ahead. He slid his fingers down Eddie’s forearm and picked up his hand, turning it over and pressing a shy kiss into the palm, ignoring the blood soaked into the cracks of Eddie’s skin.

“I wanted everything to be perfect,” he murmured, in a voice so soft that he hardly recognized it. “I wanted to be ready for you.”

Suddenly the hand disappeared behind him and buried itself roughly in Waylon’s hair, gripping it and forcing his head to tilt backwards. Eddie’s eyes were sharp and searching as he stared into Waylon’s face, and it took every ounce of Waylon’s acting abilities to not let his fear show. He smiled bashfully and then arched his neck back to press his head into the grip of Eddie’s hand, like a cat relishing being petted. 

Still looking wary, but less outright hostile, Eddie dropped his other hand down to Waylon’s calf, just below the hem of the wedding dress. He slowly stroked up the inside of Waylon’s leg, maintaining eye contact, but his eyelids drooped and pupils dilated as he reached the soft, shaved skin of the inner thigh. He continued his journey upwards and the tension in his brow spread out into an expression of curiosity when he found, instead of soft flesh, a smooth and solid surface.

*

“Can I get a soda or something? Or even just a cup of water. Anything but more of that coffee.”

The agent stared across the table at Park, trying to figure out if he was being deliberately provocative. It was hard to tell, but he thought he could see the faintest hint of a smirk at the corner of Park’s mouth.

“I’ll get someone to bring you some water next time we break,” the agent said, as calmly as he could manage. “Now why don’t you tell me what Gluskin found under your skirt?”

“Oh right,” Park said, as though he’d forgotten what they were talking about. “So around the time I started shaving my pubes in the bathroom, I pretty much resigned myself to the fact that I was going to have to get horizontal with Gluskin. Which meant I had to take my junk out of the equation before he did. Thank god for old plumbing and lazy maintenance guys, because I found a roll of duct tape under the sink.”

The agent’s brow furrowed, and then his eyes slowly widened as he formed a horrifying mental picture.

“Relax,” Park said, apparently amused by watching the agent’s expression change. “I’m not a total idiot. And I think I’d rather let Eddie kill me than have to peel duct tape directly off my ballsack later. I covered the whole, you know, package with a bit of cloth that I’d cut off my jumpsuit, and then just kind of pulled it forward and squished it down and taped it all out of the way.”

The agent was still faintly disturbed, and he definitely didn’t like the imagery conjured by the word “squished,” but he was ready to move the questioning along.

“And that worked?”

Park nodded, suddenly looking lost in thought. “It might not have. He could just as easily have lost it and killed me, or decided it wasn’t good enough and done his own surgery. But I didn’t give him time to process it or start asking too many questions. I had to distract him.”

*

“What have you done, clever little thing?” Eddie asked quietly, probing around the edges of the tape with his fingers. The word “clever” did not sound like praise. It had a dangerous edge to it, like Eddie didn’t consider cleverness to be a desirable quality in a wife.

His heart pounding with spiking adrenaline, Waylon tilted his hips forwards and hunched his upper body over, resting his cheek against Eddie’s bicep as he ran his fingers down to where the hand was searching under the dress. His fingertips skittered over Eddie’s large knuckles and he gently guided the hand down and away from the duct tape, down into the V of Waylon’s legs and back into the place he’d prepared. The place that was warm, and soft, and giving, and slippery.

*

The agent cleared his throat quietly and said. “How exactly…”

“Well, unfortunately the forgetful maintenance guy didn’t also leave a convenient tube of KY,” Park said sardonically. “Fortunately, I had an hour of prep time and I had spit.”

For once, the agent was genuinely at a loss for words.

“A _lot_ of spit,” Park emphasized.

*

“Ohhh,” Eddie moaned, the noise coming from deep in his chest. He needed no further encouragement from Waylon to push two fingers in, eagerly probing. Eddie pressed his body closer and Waylon responded in kind, hiding his wince by burying his face in Eddie’s patchwork wedding vest. It required no acting to let his breathing get harsh and to let small whines escape him and to beg in a quiet voice:

“Gently, gently, please…”

“Yes, yes, of course.” Eddie withdrew his fingers reluctantly, extracting his hand from under the dress so that he could cup Waylon’s face in both hands and tilt it upwards - a loving echo of his harsh grab from earlier. “You kept yourself pure, didn’t you? You were waiting for me. I’ll be, I’ll be…” His voice grew rough. “I’ll be the first man to see you naked. Ah, finally I can…”

Eddie dropped a hand down to the front of the dress, where Waylon had miraculously managed to convince him there were breasts instead of a man’s flat chest, and tugged down one of the cups to expose a nipple. Something about it felt weirdly scandalous, even though Waylon had been far more naked than this at the public pool or on hot summer days in the local park. Perhaps it was the way Eddie sighed beatifically and then pressed his mouth to the tiny nub, heating it with his breath and then with his tongue…

*

“And then we had sex. I mean, he kind of threw me over his shoulder and carried me back to his cave first. But then we had sex.”

The agent was staring fixedly down at his notebook, where he had written nothing but his pen had been drawing a slow trail of ink across the page. “Yes,” he managed to say. “That's how you phrased it in your statement. ‘We had sex.’ You can understand why I was confused by it.”

“Of course,” Park said. “That must be why you asked for all these details.”

“Yes. I just needed to clarify what you meant.”

They eyed each other across the table like two combatants in a knife fight. The agent struck out next.

“So the sex was consensual.”

Park sighed, like he was disappointed that the agent had brought everything back to that word once again. “Yeah, sure, why not? I mean, I was having sex with him because the alternative was an unspeakably horrible death. And he was having sex with me because he was living in a delusion brewed out of childhood trauma and deliberately exacerbated by the people who were supposed to be treating him. But if you’re asking if it took two to tango - yes, in this instance, it did. And you could say I was the one who invited him onto the dance floor.”

The agent considered this for a moment. “And how would you characterize the sex?” he asked eventually.

“Jesus!” Park exclaimed, leaning back in his chair. “You know, if you want the _Dear Penthouse_ version you should go and ask Eddie. I’m sure he’ll be all too happy to give you a play-by-play. Lots of poetic adjectives. Probably some sound effects as well.”

“Yes,” the agent said tersely. “That’s why I’m asking you, not him.”

“Well, hell, I don’t know man.” Park looked up at the ceiling for a moment before he continued. “I remember I was being really careful. We weren’t out of the woods yet. I didn’t know what might accidentally set off one of his triggers, so I had to guess. I couldn’t just starfish, or lie there all stiff, because that might remind him of what happened to him as a kid. But I couldn’t get too aggressive with him, because that could remind him of it as well. So I just kind of let him take the lead, and gave him some encouragement.”

“Encouragement?”

“Yeah, you know, I… I put my legs up around him. And I kind of held him close and I…” Park was blushing now - the first time that the agent had seen him with his feathers truly ruffled. “I did some dirty talk in his ear.”

“Dirty talk.”

“Oh fuck you, I’m not repeating any of it. Most of it wasn’t even _dirty_ -dirty talk, it was just weird vanilla shit that I thought he’d be into. Stream-of-consciousness stuff about, you know, wombs and babies and starting a family and how he’d be a good father. I was just trying to get it over with before my half-assed spit lube job dried out. And I guess it worked for him because he was done in about three minutes.”

The agent, feeling he had the upper hand once again, kept his face very neutral as he asked, “And did you enjoy it?”

Park stared at him, “Did I… how the fuck is _that_ a relevant question? And no, of course I didn’t enjoy it! God, I was just trying to get back to my wife and kids. To my _real_ family. Can I get some goddamn water now?”

*

Waylon could hear the screams and gibbering of the other patients in the distance, but he knew they wouldn’t dare approach the Groom’s territory. The loosely-stitched wedding dress had been ripped apart in Eddie’s excitement and was now scattered around the pile of mattresses that made up the marital bed. Waylon could feel a spring digging into his back as he stared up at the ceiling.

Eddie was finally quiet, though he wasn’t asleep yet. The glint of his pale blue eyes was picked out by the guttering candlelight. His hand still rested on Waylon’s stomach, just above the edges of the duct tape, where his womb would be if he were actually a woman. Things had been starting to get worryingly sore, and in a fit of desperation Waylon had grabbed Eddie’s hand and put it there and said _now, now, I’m ready, can you feel I’m ready? Put a baby in me._

It’d had the desired effect. That was about thirty minutes ago, and Eddie hadn’t moved his hand since.


	4. Chapter 4

“Are we done here?”

Waylon Park was less agitated than he had been at the end of their last conversation, but he was still bristling with hostility, his arms folded tightly across his chest.

“Almost,” the agent said, looking through the folder in a deliberately unhurried manner. “I’d just like to go through how you got out of Mount Massive Asylum in the end.”

“I already said in my statement.”

“Yes, yes, you…” The agent plucked the document from within the sheaf of papers and scanned it. “You persuaded Gluskin to take you on a ‘honeymoon’, and he led you out of the building.”

“Yeah. That’s what happened.”

“It’s a little light on the details Mr. Park. And it doesn’t explain Gluskin’s injury.”

Park shifted his gaze. “So he was injured, so what? He was a guinea pig in some fucked up experiments and then he was hunting down victims in an insane asylum. He could have been injured a thousand different ways.”

“It was a recent injury. Still bleeding when we picked the two of you up.”

The agent’s smile was shark-like as he took in Park’s nervously darting eyes and the white pressure points where his fingers were digging into the skin of his arms.

“Why don’t you tell me _exactly_ what happened?”

*

Waylon didn’t know how long he had slept for. Surely only a few hours. But he started awake, heartrate rocketing with the panic instilled in him over the last few days, and had to bite back a scream when he saw Eddie Gluskin’s marred face and disturbing eyes looming over him.

“Good morning, darling,” he whispered. “You look like an angel when you’re sleeping.”

Waylon was _extremely_ sure that wasn’t true, but he didn’t argue over it. He sat up, hissing sharply at the soreness in his ass, looking around for his clothes until he remembered that he’d been wearing a wedding dress, and it was now in a sorry state.

As if reading his mind, Eddie reached behind him and produced a folded piece of greyish-white clothing. “I made this for you, dear. For your first day in our new life together.”

Waylon took it with some trepidation, already able to tell that it was another dress. But as he shook it out, he was relieved to find that it was fairly basic. The materials Eddie had at hand in Mount Massive didn’t exactly lend themselves to frilly feminine clothing. Waylon pulled the dress over his head and was once again surprised to find it a good fit. Once dressed, he chanced another look at Eddie.

Yesterday, it had felt like there was only the toss of a coin separating Waylon from being mutilated and murdered or surviving. The way Eddie was looking at him now, though, it was almost possible to forget that he was a deranged killer. His eyes were soft and admiring and bursting with affection. It was a good thing, probably, but Waylon felt uncomfortable. Perhaps he’d taken things a bit too far with all that talk about babies. It wasn’t like he _missed_ Eddie’s fixation on cutting his junk off, but this calm and doting Eddie was creepy in his own way.

Still. Waylon wasn’t above taking advantage of it.

He shuffled closer to Eddie on the bed and then leaned against him submissively, letting his head loll against Eddie’s chest as a hand came up to caress his hair.

“Eddie,” Waylon said softly, since using the name hadn’t gotten him killed last time. “Are we leaving soon?”

He felt Eddie’s muscle stiffen slightly. “Leaving?”

“For our honeymoon.”

“Honeymoon,” Eddie repeated again, sounding befuddled.

“We just got married. We should go on our honeymoon now. It’s tradition.” Eddie loved the idea of tradition - Waylon knew that much. “I want to get away from all these other people.” His pause was helpfully punctuated by a distant scream. “I just want to be alone with you.”

“We can be alone here.” Eddie’s voice was starting to get defensive and nervous, like the idea of leaving Mount Massive was upsetting him. “I won’t let anyone in our home.”

Waylon bit back on a counter-argument. He knew that Eddie wouldn’t take kindly to a nagging wife. Instead he stayed silent, but sat up and moved his head away from Eddie’s chest and looked down at the floor. He opened a tap on the great ocean of misery and terror and desperation inside him and let just a little of it trickle out, forming as an expression of weary sadness on his face.

Eddie was even more agitated now. He stood up abruptly and paced back and forth a few times, his gaze landing on Waylon each time he returned.

“Ah, don’t look like that!” he pleaded. “I can’t stand it when you pout. Darling, _darling!_ ” He suddenly dropped to his knees in front of Waylon and grabbed his chin, forcing Waylon to look into his damaged face. Waylon obeyed, but left all of the sadness in his eyes.

He tried to stay calm when Eddie wrenched himself away with a growl and then pulled out the knife that he apparently always carried with him, pacing up and down and muttering obscenities under his breath and occasionally slashing the air in front of him with the blade. For a moment Waylon was certain that he’d pushed it too far and was about to be killed in a fit of Eddie’s rage, but he didn’t try to appease or apologize. Instead he just stayed quiet and still - even when Eddie dropped to his knees and jammed the knife up under Waylon’s chin, the cold metal against his throat.

He didn’t sink the knife into Waylon’s flesh, though. Eddie was breathing harshly through his snarling teeth, eyes wild, flecks of saliva spraying Waylon’s face. It took every ounce of his self-control not to react.

They stayed there like that for long seconds - Eddie on the verge of dealing with strong emotions the way he usually did, Waylon behaving pliant and indifferent to the close threat of death. At last Eddie made a noise of angry distress and let the hand holding the knife drop down to his side, reaching up with his other hand to touch Waylon’s face.

“You brat,” he exclaimed in an exhausted, seething voice. “Oh, I love you. You spoiled thing. I can’t say no to you. Fine, we’ll leave. I’ll take you on a honeymoon. Will that make you happy, you clever little witch?”

Waylon lifted his gaze again, feigning a slow surprise that lifted into a smile. As soon as his lips curved upwards at the corners Eddie whooped in delight, his mood turning on a dime, and swooped in to kiss Waylon sloppily, diving forward to press against his face and then pulling back to look at it.

“There you are! Smiling now you’ve got your way, aren’t you? Clever, clever, hmmm? My beautiful bride is so cruel to me.”

Waylon was baffled by the mix of praise and insults. Had he somehow, accidentally managed to break Eddie’s Madonna-Whore complex? Waylon was playing with fire and it was possible that at any moment the spell would break and he’d end up with a knife in his gut - or worse - but he couldn’t afford to back off now. 

“Thank you. Can we go now, please?”

*

“He picked me up and carried me,” Park said, his eyes distant with the memory, his expression troubled. “I could kind of walk, but he seemed to like carrying me. He had a keycard that opened most of the doors… I guess he must have killed one of the guards and taken it at some point. And everywhere we went, the others ran away when they saw him coming. Until…”

Park stopped. He was staring down into his lap at his hands, which were shaking slightly.

“Until?” the agent prompted.

“We were so close,” Park said after a moment. “I really thought it was going to be that easy. But then he came out of nowhere.”

“Who did?”

Park looked up, eyes full of remembered dread. “The Cannibal.”

*

It happened in an instant. One moment Waylon was being carried down a hallway on the ground floor, almost starting to feel calm. Then he was being thrown to the ground, rolling over and over, and behind him he heard a horribly familiar voice.

“Put him down! He’s mine, he’s mine, I found him first!”

Frank Manera.

The Cannibal.

The madman who had caught Waylon before Eddie did. Who had dragged him to one of the incinerators to cook before eating him. Waylon had managed to kick out the crumbling back wall of the brick kiln before he could be much more than singed, but as he escaped he’d heard Manera’s cheated howl chasing him. The sound had crawled under his skin and stayed there, and now terror vibrated through him at hearing Manera’s voice again.

Trying to get breath back into his bruised chest, Waylon rolled over and saw Eddie on the floor, grappling up at Manera’s leg with clawed fingers. Manera was scrawny, his body withered by his refusal to eat during his incarceration as he became single-mindedly obsessed with consuming human flesh. The people he’d eaten since then hadn’t put the fat back on him, but instead made him more wiry and powerful, like a wolf. Eddie outweighed him, but he had been caught off-guard and his head snapped back sickeningly when Manera kicked him in the face.

“Eddie!” Waylon choked out, unsure if he was just horrified at losing his bodyguard or if he was genuinely concerned. He wasn’t given much time to decide. He heard the sickening whirr of Manera’s buzzsaw and then he was being grabbed by the throat and dragged down the hall, his heels squeaking helplessly on the linoleum.

“I’ve thought about your lonely flesh since you got away from me,” Manera snarled in his grating voice as he dragged Waylon. “You’re mine. You’re going to feed me. I’ll cut into your chest and drink your sweet red blood. I’ll cut your stomach open, make you watch while I pull your intestines out of you and chew on them. Spit them back into your mouth, let you taste yourself. I’ll hang you up for a few days, get a better flavor. I’ll c-ARGH!”

Waylon had managed to twist his head around and sink his teeth into Manera’s arm, biting down hard until blood ran into his mouth. Manera let go of him a moment before Waylon stopped biting, so for a brief second he was hanging off the Cannibal’s arm by his teeth. Then he unlocked his jaws and thudded to the floor and began crawling away, trying to stand, crying out in pain as his ankle buckled underneath him and then again as Manera snarled his fingers into Waylon’s hair and _twisted._

There was a thudding of footsteps, and Manera was knocked away so hard that he ripped out a few strands of Waylon’s hair as he went. Waylon saw Eddie on top of the Cannibal, his face a horrifying mask of rage, with blood dripping from his nose and mouth.

“How dare you?” he screeched. “How _dare_ you touch my wife? I’ll slit you open and string you up! She’s mine!”

“Mine!” Manera echoed in a roar, reaching up and trying to gouge out Eddie’s eyes.

Waylon staggered to his feet and looked at the two murderers caught in their deadly scrap, then up the hallway. He was so close. He could see the entrance hall of Mount Massive Asylum. Fuck, he could see _daylight_. Eddie was distracted, Manera was distracted. Waylon couldn’t have asked for a better opportunity to get away from these lunatics and out of this hellhole.

Suddenly he heard a horrible familiar metallic whining noise, followed by a scream of agony. He looked back. Manera had the buzzsaw jammed up against Eddie’s stomach and the serrated spinning blade was carving into the meat of his side like it was a Christmas turkey. Blood spattered far up the hallway in a long streak and Waylon…

Waylon moved without even thinking.

*

“Why didn’t you leave?” the agent asked.

Park looked up reluctantly, his expression wild and hunted. All of his walls were down now. He looked like a butterfly helplessly pinned to a board.

“I should have,” he whispered.

“But you didn’t.”

“Eddie was there because of me. Because I asked him to take me out of that place. If I hadn’t, he would have stayed in his part of the asylum. He was… it was my fault, and…”

“And what?”

“I don’t know,” Park moaned, burying his face in his hands. “You weren’t in there, you don’t know what it’s like. You start to lose a grip on yourself. Start to lose sight of reality. Even though it was all this insane act and not even real, I… I… freakin’ _married_ him. And we’d had sex. And I’d manipulated him, and used him and I…”

He paused, but he was breathing so loudly and harshly that not even the ticking of the clock could be heard. Waylon looked up, steadier now.

“I couldn’t just leave him behind.”

*

Frank Manera’s eye gave way under the vicious press of Waylon’s fingers, resisting only for a moment before popping out and sliding down onto his cheek. Manera screamed and loosened his grip on the buzzsaw, and Waylon was there to catch it when it fell out of Eddie. He dragged Manera back with one finger still buried in his eye socket, holding his head like a bowling ball, then jammed the buzzsaw up and under his ribs and began carving a path into Manera’s chest, towards his heart.

Later, Waylon didn’t remember how long it took. It could have been seconds or hours. Manera’s blood was sluicing down Waylon’s arm as the body twitched horribly in his embrace. The buzzsaw sputtered and jammed when it caught on bone. Finally Manera went still and at some point after that Waylon released his grip on the buzzsaw and drew his hand out of the tunnel he’d cut into the cannibal’s body.

“Darling,” he heard Eddie sigh. That jerked Waylon back to reality and he looked over to see Eddie propped up against the wall, looking at him with admiring eyes. “I knew you wouldn’t stand for him touching you. You’re a good girl, aren’t you? My sweet, fierce girl.”

Waylon felt like he should be shaking or crying. He’d just _killed_ a man. But instead he limped over to Eddie and knelt down to inspect the injury on his side. It was bleeding a lot, but it didn’t look like Manera had cut deep enough to reach any organs.

“We have to go,” Waylon said in a clear, firm voice. He’d left his shy wilting flower persona behind somewhere inside the dripping red cave of Manera’s chest, and couldn’t have conjured it again if he tried. “Can you stand? Put pressure on your wound.”

When Eddie didn’t immediately obey him, Waylon picked up his large hand and pressed it hard over the wound until he felt Eddie take up the strain of holding the blood flow in. He must have been in pain, but he didn’t show it. He was gazing into Waylon’s face dreamily, making no move to stand.

“Get up!” Waylon commanded sharply. “I can’t lift you. I’m not strong enough and my ankle’s still all messed up. Push yourself up the wall if it helps.”

Being very careful of his injured leg, Waylon managed to stand up straight and Eddie followed him as if on a fishhook, bracing his back against the wall and grunting as he pushed himself into a standing position. Blood spurted between the fingertips of the hand covering the injury as he exerted himself.

“Good, let’s go,” Waylon said briskly, starting to limp down the hallway. He felt Eddie touch his waist with intent and, without looking around, snapped, “No, you can’t carry me any more, you need to keep pressure on that cut.”

They must have looked like something out of a horror movie as they made their way to the front door - Eddie with his pale skin, red-blue eyes and blood-soaked tux, and Waylon himself looking like the final scene of _Carrie_ as the blood drenching his homemade dress made it cling to his skin. The arm he’d killed Manera with was wearing a thick glove of gore.

There were bodies scattered around, as well as a pile of flesh and organs that looked like an entire body had been suddenly ripped apart. Waylon didn’t care, though. He could see outside. The sun was rising, flooding the grounds of Mount Massive Asylum with light that spilled in through the door. He sobbed in relief and picked up the pace as he limped towards the exit, desperate to be free.

But as he did so he felt a sudden, horrible chill up his spine. Though he couldn’t yet see it he sensed its presence. The thing. The entity. The abomination from the Morphogenic Engine.

Waylon glanced around and saw Eddie standing still, staring up at the ceiling, transfixed and terrified. Eddie was actually afraid - a fear that had cut through his madness to the core of him and left him wide-eyed and unable to move, like a small mouse being hypnotized by the swaying of a snake in the moments before it was gobbled up.

“Eddie,” Waylon begged, not daring to look up. “We have to go, please, we have to go.”

“It’s here,” Eddie was saying, under his breath at first and then getting louder and louder. “It’s here, it’s here, it’s here, _it’s here, IT’S HERE, IT’S HERE!_ ”

“Eddie, _move!”_ Waylon screamed, grabbing the upper sleeve of Eddie’s arm and dragging him towards the door. 

He was so close to freedom, to getting back to Lisa and the kids, but he couldn’t leave Eddie behind. The Murkoff Corporation, the shady and powerful company operating behind the scenes of Mount Massive, had tried to feed Eddie to that thing. They’d offered him up to it as a sacrifice, letting it twist his mind and turn the fire of his madness into a raging inferno. And Waylon had helped them do it. Even though all he’d done was write lines of computer code, he’d been there when they tortured Eddie. He’d looked into Eddie’s eyes as the man begged for help, and given none. Eddie was a killer, yes, but he was also a victim. If Waylon left him to the mercy of the entity, he would be guilty twice over.

Fortunately the tug of his hand seemed to break the spell over Eddie enough to get him moving towards the door again. They staggered into the searingly bright sun together as behind him Waylon heard a noise like the absence of noise, like sound being sucked into a void.

He expected to die, to feel his body being ripped apart at any moment. But death didn’t claim Waylon that day. It let him limp down the stone steps, trailing the tatters of the bandage around his ankle. It let him pull himself behind the wheel of the red Jeep parked at the entrance to the grounds. It let Eddie climb into the passenger seat, still wild-eyed and trembling. And, for whatever reason, it let them drive away from Mount Massive Asylum for the Criminally Insane.

*

Waylon Park was slumped in his chair, exhausted. The agent eyed him coolly and clinically, calm in his victory.

“Please,” Park whispered. “Please. I just want to get back to my family.”

“I’m afraid it’s not quite that simple, Mr. Park,” the agent said. “You just confessed to killing a man.”

“It was self-defense!”

“That’s not for you to decide.” The agent let a silence hang in the air for a moment, savoring it before continuing. “And then there’s this.”

He opened his folder and took out a small sheaf of papers, stapled together, sliding them across the table. Park looked down at them blearily, trying to comprehend the scribbled writing.

“Those are admission papers, Mr. Park,” the agent said silkily. “We found them when we were searching the building.”

“No, no,” Park said, panicking, shaking his head. “No, that’s bullshit. That’s not real.”

“Yes, it is. You weren’t an employee at Mount Massive Asylum. You were a patient.”

“That’s _bullshit!”_ Park repeated, anger sparking in his eyes. “They kidnapped me. They knew I was trying to blow the whistle on the sick stuff they were doing in there, so they forcibly admitted me just to shut me up. They… they put me into their experiments. Please, please, you’ve seen the tapes, you must know what they were doing in there, right?”

“Don’t worry, Mr. Park,” the agent reassured, his voice as smooth as a knife sliding between a set of ribs. “We’re going to make sure you get the help you need.”

*

The agent stepped out into the hall, leaving the two burly orderlies behind to sedate Waylon Park. His phone rang and he pulled it out of his pocket with a wry smile, knowing that his boss must have just watched him exit on the security cameras.

_“Did you get everything you need?”_

“Yeah, we have the whole story from Park now. Including a murder confession. Well, it can be called murder with a bit of selective editing.”

_“Good. We’ll use that and the admission papers to discredit him.”_

“What are the instructions for Park and Gluskin?”

_“Murkoff wants Gluskin back for further study. Park is going to hang himself in his cell with a pair of shoelaces. Find a scapegoat to fire for missing them during processing.”_

“Understood.”

The agent heard the click of the call ending and put his phone back in his pocket. He checked his watch and groaned at how late it had gotten. This whole mess had been taxing on his time, but now it was almost over.

Almost.


	5. Chapter 5

Waylon felt like his veins were full of lead, weighing his body down too much to move. His head was aching and felt like it was full of fog, and his mouth was horribly dry. He groaned and turned over on the thin mattress, his limbs flopping like a fish out of water. Blearily, through the bars of his cell, he saw a red light flashing in time with the blaring alarm.

His cell door was slightly ajar.

With a Herculean effort, Waylon dragged himself into an upright seated position, shaking his head as if he could rid his body of the sedatives that way. When the dizziness of sitting up subsided he wobbled to his feet, immediately tilting over and having to grab the bars to stay upright. He pulled himself over to the door like a mountain climber on a sheer cliffside, pushed the cell door open the rest of the way, and then half-flung himself out so he landed on the wall opposite, leaning his weight on it.

He made his way past the line of cells - all empty now. He hadn’t seen if there was anyone in them before. He’d been unconscious by the time they dragged him in here. But there were no guards or orderlies to stop him as he made his way to the door.

Once there, Waylon peered around the doorframe as carefully as he could manage in his drugged state. The feeling of looking fearfully into a hallway brought back recent, unpleasant memories. But this wasn’t Mount Massive. Whatever might be out there, it couldn’t be as bad as that creature born in the Morphogenic Engine.

Waylon recognized one of the orderlies who’d subdued him earlier. He was sitting in a chair outside the door, his head bent back at a 90 degree angle and his mouth cracked wide open with the handle of his baton sticking out between his teeth. The rest of the baton had been rammed down into his throat, which was bruised purple and bulging. His eyes stared unseeingly. Swallowing hard, Waylon reached down and pulled the keycard from its place on the orderly’s belt.

He heard a choking noise from further up the hall. The flashing emergency lights painted the walls rhythmically in white, red, white, red, white, red. There were bodies strewn all over the place, but the noise was coming from the closest one. Waylon looked down and saw the agent staring up at him with wide, dimming eyes. There was an expensive-looking silver pen protruding from his throat, blood mingling with ink as it dripped off the end.

Still too hazy from the drugs to be shocked, Waylon blinked down at the dying man stupidly. Then he noticed movement from further up the hall. He lifted his head and made an effort to focus his gaze on the one figure who was still standing.

The long sleeves of the straightjacket were bunched up to Eddie’s elbows. The garment was drenched in blood. The lights flashed over Eddie, turning him red, white, red, white, red, white. His teeth bared in a Cheshire Cat grin as he looked at Waylon. He called out:

“Darling!”

And Waylon smiled.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thanks for all the kind comments! This is such a wildly niche fandom that I wasn't sure anyone was going to read this at all haha. But I just had to indulge my favorite new weird ship.


End file.
